ISO 9001 procedures may have resulted in TRAX ridership dropoff.

Today KSL-TV ran a story on how TRAX ridership has dropped off by varying amounts from around 5 percent to over 20 percent in the last year.

They blamed all kinds of things, including new technology that senses heat rather than just motion, and that was said to eliminate things like luggage, bicycles, etc., but that does not wash in the summer when EVERYTHING gets hot in the sun, including those items where they have been siiting on platforms and on the fronts of buses on the bike racks.

Yes that might be true to an extent, we'll have to go through another year to try to eliminate things for sure. More data will have to be collected, including observed data vs. data retrieved by the sensors. Data will have to be crosschecked with maybe video surveillance and actual people being out there to monitor things to be certain that was not the problem.

But the big thing is people are not using buses because they have given up on quality service because routes and areas being served are being eliminated on August 26th. Most of the major areas are intact, but if you live off a four-lane road, there will actually be less service in areas where it needs more, and some areas may be miles from a bus, especially on Saturdays. I plan to post on the final Route 78, 218, and a couple other routes in the south and west of Salt Lake County to give more of an idea of what kind of damage to UTAs plans their dropping Saturday service on these routes will do.

There are ADA issues also.

That aside, those items mean that there will be less people riding buses because they don't have access to them at convenient times and locations, nor will they have them on some days of the week. There may be other issues as well. As I find them I will be posting audits and gap analyses of these issues as soon as I can make them ready.

The whole point of TRAX is to help people make it quickly from one end of the Valley to the other, and to other buses. It is important that people have use of the entire grid that UTA runs on now and after August 26th on Monday through Saturday at least, and reasonably early in the morning and late in the evening so they can have flexibility to work, recreate, and attend community and church events throughout the city and use public transit to get there and back.

ISO 9001 requires there to be ample availability of service as part of the quality guidelines, simply by default even if there is nothing in the standard. After all, the end user is the final judge of whether or not ISO 9001 and its environmental couterpart, ISO 14001 are truly being followed and that UTA is actually being honest in their dealings with their fellowmen in providing adequate service to all significant areas they run buses on regardless of the day of the week, or how difficult it is to fund, maintain, and provide the service to everyone who pays into the system, whether it be by fare or by tax.

But that is not fully being met, and it will not be fully met and may be less so after August 26th, unless certain things are done to rectify the problem for all involved by then.